WHEN YOU THINK OF ABS,
you may think of Brad
Pitt or Janet Jackson.
You may think of
magazine covers and
underwear commercials. You may think of six-packs,
washboards, and a belly so tight that you could bounce
a marble off it. Your cynical side may also think of airbrushing,
starvation diets, and an exercise regimen so
time-consuming it would violate labor laws. Abs, you assume,
are reserved for athletes, for models, for bodybuilders,
for trainers, for rappers, for the half-dressed
“talent” on infomercials, for genetic freaks, for the liposuctioned,
and for people who would classify celery as a
dessert.
Your conclusion: You have a better chance of scaling
Mount Everest in a Speedo than you do of getting great
abs.
As the editor-in-chief of Men’s Health magazine, I
know that you—no matter how big your belly, how many
diets you’ve tried, or how tempting the Everest Speedo
ix
challenge sounds—can develop great abs. See, I analyze health
and fitness information the way brokers analyze the market. It’s
my job to find the fastest, best, and smartest ways for you to make
tremendous gains in your most important investment: your body.
So when I think about abs, the only thing I think about is this:
how you can get them.
I understand the struggle. You look down, see a Jell-O mold
implanted in your gut, and figure that your days of having a
flat stomach vanished the day you graduated from high school.
But in a way, you really shouldn’t think of your abs as being extinct.
Think of your abs as the third cousins you met at a past
family reunion. You remember seeing them, so you have a
vague memory of what they look like, but it’s been so long that
you really don’t have a clue where they are now. Well, even if
it’s been decades since you’ve made any kind of contact with
them, the physiological fact remains: You have abs.
The Abs Diet is going to help you find them.
At a time when more than 130 million Americans are overweight
or obese and when weight-loss news garners as much
front-page attention as celebrity scandals (well, almost as much),
there’s never been a more critical time to focus on your weight,
your shape, and your health. I know that some critics will see a
chiseled midsection as the modern American symbol of vanity, but
developing a six-pack is more than just a way to support the
mirror industry.
Abs are the contemporary badge of fitness.
They’re the ultimate predictor of your health.
And since flat stomachs boost sex appeal, they represent the
one part of your body that has the same power of seduction over
both men and women.
Depending on where you fall on the body-shape scale, there’s
a good chance you’ve searched for your abs before. Maybe you’ve
failed on previous weight-loss attempts, and maybe you’ve yo-yoed
x I N T R O D U C T I O N
more than a toy store. I know what you’ve gone through—I’ve
talked to and heard from thousands of folks who have shared
their weight-loss success stories with Men’s Health. But I also
know what you’ve gone through because I, too, know what it’s like
to feel fat.
As a latchkey kid growing up in the early ’80s, I made every
mistake in the book. I ate fast food instead of smart food. I played
video games when I should’ve been playing outside. By the time I
reached 14, I was carrying 212 pounds of torpid teenage tallow on
my 5-foot-10 frame. I wanted to be built like a basketball player,
but instead I was built like the basketball. And I paid for it with
a steady bombardment of humiliation. My older brother, Eric,
would invite friends to our house just to watch me eat lunch.
“Don’t disturb the big animal,” he’d tell his friends. “It’s feeding.”
Like most kids, I learned my health habits from my parents,
particularly my father. He was more than 100 pounds overweight
for most of his adult life. Over time, he developed hypertension
and diabetes, had a minor heart attack, and would have to stop
at the top of a short flight of stairs just to catch his breath. A
massive stroke ended his life at 52. My father died because he ignored
many signals of failing health—especially the fat that
padded his gut.
But I got lucky. When I graduated from high school, I joined
the Naval Reserve, where the tenets of fitness were pounded into
me, day after day after day. Soon after I graduated from college, I
joined Men’s Health and learned the importance of proper nutrition
and—just as important—the danger of carrying around too
much fat in your gut.
Belly fat—the fat that pushes your waist out—is the most
dangerous fat on your body. And it’s one of the reasons why the
Abs Diet emphasizes losing belly fat—because doing so means
you’ll live longer. Belly fat is classified as visceral fat; that means
it is located behind your abdominal wall and surrounds your in-
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ternal organs. Because it carries an express-lane pass to your
heart and other important organs, visceral fat is the fat that can
kill you. Just consider one University of Alabama–Birmingham
study in which researchers used seven different measurements to
determine a person’s risks of cardiovascular disease. They concluded
that the amount of visceral fat the subjects carried was
the single best predictor of heart disease risk.
Whether you want to change your body to improve your
health, your looks, your athletic performance, or your sex appeal,
the Abs Diet offers you a simple promise: If you follow this plan,
you will transform your body so that you can accomplish each and
every one of those goals. As a bonus, the Abs Diet will do something
more than just enhance your life; the Abs Diet is going to
save it.
When you think of all you have to gain with the Abs Diet, it
becomes apparent what’s wrong with most diet plans out there:
They’re all about losing. When you consider America’s obesity
epidemic, losing weight is an admirable goal. But I think there’s
a fundamental psychological reason why many of these diets
fail: There’s no motivation in losing. Americans don’t like to lose.
We don’t like to lose a round of golf. We don’t like to lose in the
market. We don’t like to lose our looks. We don’t like to lose anything.
In a way, we don’t even like losing weight, because we’ve
all been force-fed the notion that bigger is better. Instead, we’re
programmed to gain. We want to gain fitness. We want to gain
strength. We want to add to our life, not subtract from it. We’re
empire builders. We want to win—and see our results. So consider
the Abs Diet a shift in the way you think about your body
and about weight loss. This program concentrates on what you
can gain and how you can gain it. As a result of what you’ll gain
from this program—abs, muscle tone, better health, a great sex
life (more on that later)—you’ll effortlessly strip away fat from
your body and change your body shape forever.
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No diet plan would work without good nutrition, so that, of
course, is the major focus of the Abs Diet. You’ll not only learn
what to eat; you’ll learn how to eat to make your body burn fat
furiously, as well as how to make sure that you can control the
cravings that threaten to add girth to your gut. The focus of the
plan revolves around—but does not restrict you to—12 “Powerfoods”
that are among the best sources for protein, fiber, and all
the other ingredients and nutrients that help fight fat. When
you build your diet around these foods, you will build a new
body in the process. But we’ve taken this weight-loss plan to a
whole other level. While nutrition remains a principal component
of most diets, too many programs out there focus solely on
how to change your eating habits—cut carbs, add cabbage soup,
eat at Subway twice a day. Those programs fail to recognize a
crucial component of weight control: the fact that our bodies
have their own natural fat-burning mechanism. . . .
Muscle.
Building just a few pounds of muscle in your body is the physiological
equivalent of kicking fat out on its butt and telling it to
never come back again. Muscle exponentially speeds up the fatbusting
process: 1 pound of muscle requires your body to burn up
to 50 extra calories a day just to maintain that muscle. Now think
about what happens if you add a mere 6 pounds of muscle over
the course of a diet program. It’ll take your body up to 300 extra
calories a day just to feed that muscle; essentially, you’ll burn off
an extra pound of fat every 10 days without doing a thing (and
that’s not even including the gains you can make by changing
your diet). When you combine exercise with the foods that most
promote muscle growth, the ones that keep you full, and the ones
that give your body a well-balanced supply of nutrients, you’ll be
in the sweet spot, doing what this plan is all about.
You’ll turn your fat into muscle.
Does that mean the Abs Diet is going to make you burly, bulky,
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muscle-bound, or governor of California? Not at all. The Abs Diet
and the accompanying Abs Diet Workout emphasize leanness and
muscle tone—not big, bulky muscles.
Going back to that important investment, you can think
about muscle as your compound interest. If you’ve ever taken a
basic economics course, then you understand how compound interest
works: If you invest $100 in a high-yield fund and add a
little more every month, over time that investment will grow
and grow to half a million dollars or more. But you’ll have invested
only a fraction of the money yourself. Compound interest
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